Opening November 21th Collectivity brings together artworks that employ diverse materials and techniques to activate a sense of community that goes beyond the boundaries of time, space, and media. The works in the first half of the gallery, many of them produced collaboratively, demonstrate cross-cultural movements of community using historically and personally charged materials. The performative aspects of collective relationships are explored in artworks, such as the fringed punching bag, that transform cultural tropes into iconic references. In another section, artists seek to transcend traditional notions of kinship by demonstrating the multiplicity and permeability of family ties. The six-paneled photograph by Dawoud Bey introduces another group of work, which appropriates and subverts visual stereotypes of marginalized groups in order to transform them into positive representations. All of these objects explore what collectivity means for contemporary society—building bridges between the artist, the viewer, and communities worldwide. Mapping Contemporary artists have often examined our planet’s natural characteristics and the transformations resulting from human interventions as a way of recording and discussing social, economic, and environmental issues facing people worldwide. Whether conceptually driven by data collection, topographical views, or maps, the works exhibited here mine their subjects with diverse approaches and in a variety of media. They offer commentary on interconnected themes, such as changing population patterns, the effects of architecture and urbanism on modes of living, the exploration of public and private spaces, the politics of community displacement, and climate change. Together these artists have created a narrative of a world grappling with physical change, offering messages of hope as well as warnings to be heeded. Border Spanning 1,954 miles and 350 million annual legal crossings, the U.S.-Mexico border is the world’s most traversed border and, throughout its long history of mapping and remapping, has been a contested site for North/South relations. Artists featured in this gallery engage this zone as a flexible political, cultural, economic and/or psychological limit fraught with violence. The innovative strategies they develop to critically convey aspects of the border experience include: documenting the border as a physical, geographic delineation in the landscape; memorializing those whose aspirational journey across the border ended in death and examining the lives of those who survive the journey but find a different life than they expected; exploring the fate of those caught in the legal web of detention and deportation; recognizing those who contribute their labor to U.S. society but remain invisible; and addressing the endemic violence that underscores pervasive human- and drug-trafficking operations into and from the United States. These works provide powerful insights into the complex dynamics, agents, and victims of “la frontera” (the border).
